SOME MUSINGS ON THE WORD SCANDINAVIA

AS A CHILD, I’M NOT sure I even knew what Scandinavia meant. It was shrouded in a cultural mist that somehow wafted over me and mine, but why or how wasn’t at all clear to me. I was already a person divided. A girl living in America with a Norwegian mother and a Norwegian-American father, I spoke Norwegian before I spoke English, but rural Minnesota was my everyday world; Norway was another world. As a four-year-old in 1959, I had spent five months with my mother and sister in Bergen. Until I returned for a year with my family in 1967, Norway lived inside me as a jumble of inchoate fragments—isolated memories (my hands in a gooseberry bush, an orange lying in the snow, the tears of my older cousin at the dinner table), household objects (chests and china, photographs and paintings on the wall), food (especially rice pudding, bløtkake, cream cake, and little chocolates called Twist), my parents’ stories, and a few significant words. During the seven years between childhood visits, I mostly forgot Norwegian.

The advantage of not living in a place is that it becomes pure idea. Under the sway of a homesick mother and a father whose identification with the immigrant community in which he was raised led him to become a professor of Norwegian language and literature, I succumbed to an illusion of an ideal elsewhere, a magic kingdom of trolls and nisse and fiskeboller, of Ibsen, Hamsun, and Munch, a fantastic over there, where the children were happier and healthier, floors were cleaner, and the people kinder and more just. My parents weren’t uncritical of Norway, but they were both prone to a form of nationalism that flourishes in tiny cultures that have been shaped by the humiliations of external control. In the case of Norway, that meant Denmark, and after that, it meant Sweden. At some point, I discovered that together these three comprised Scandinavia. Despite the maniacal flag-waving that took place every May 17 to trumpet our independence from Sweden, it turned out that we were somehow in the same family with them, and not only them, but the Danes, too. It took a while to grapple with this concept, but eventually it penetrated my young mind, and I came to accept it.

The binding principle of Scandinavia is not geography, but language. If you have one of the three languages, the other two can be easily managed with a little work—at least on the page. Danish, so comprehensible to me in print, can quickly become a series of indistinguishable noises in the mouth and throat of an actual speaker, and Swedish, though easier to understand, can also trail off into pleasant music when I’m not paying close attention. And yet so many words belong to all three languages, and more than anything else, it is language that shapes perception of the world, that draws the lines and creates the boundaries that make what is out there legible. It is a legacy of my childhood that I am a Norwegian-American who doesn’t feel quite American but who doesn’t feel quite Norwegian either. If I didn’t speak Norwegian, I would most certainly feel alienated from that country’s culture in a far more fundamental way. It is the language that lures me into feeling the connection to a past that extends backward to a time long before I was born. The vocabulary and cadences of Norwegian continue to live inside me, and moreover, they haunt my English. My prose is decidedly Protestant, and despite the fact that Scandinavia is no longer exclusively Protestant, its mores and culture were profoundly influenced by that iconoclastic, stark, and lonely version of Christianity.

Unlike English, the Scandinavian languages are word poor. With William the Conqueror in 1066 and the infusion of Latinate French into Anglo-Saxon, what we now know as English evolved. And yet, it’s exactly their poverty of vocabulary that gives writers possibilities in the Scandinavian languages that English writers don’t have. A word like lys in Norwegian—which means both light and candle—allows repetitions, ambiguities, and depths that aren’t possible in English. Lys is a word heavy with the knowledge of darkness, of summer and winter, of precious long days of light opposed to long days of murk and clouds. In Bergen, where I went to gymnasium for a year, it rained so much that when the sun was shining, the authorities canceled school. Even after she had been living in Minnesota for years, my mother would turn her face to the sun and close her eyes as if the warm rays might disappear any moment. Perhaps the darkness lies behind the omnipresent candles in Scandinavian households, too, lit even during the day and shining in rooms at night. The northern experience of darkness and light is untranslatable. The contrast between them has to be lived in the body. I have often wondered what immigrants to Scandinavia must feel when they arrive from places where summer and winter aren’t so radically defined by light and dark, how strange it must be to shop in afternoon gloom or see the sun late at night in summer. I have wondered how it changes the rhythms of their lives and the meaning of the words light and dark in their native languages. My paternal grandparents and my father, none of them born in Norway, all spoke English with Norwegian accents. Their Norwegian, however, was unlike the language spoken on the other side of the Atlantic. Their speech was dense with nineteenth-century locutions and sprinkled with hybrids—nouns borrowed from English and assigned a gender—words for things that had no Norwegian equivalent.

This is a certainty: like the rest of Europe, Scandinavia is no longer homogenous. The stereotype of the giant, pale-skinned, Lutheran blonde (the only stock character I embody perfectly) has become an anachronism and is being replaced by a variety of body types, complexions, and religions. I, for one, celebrate a changing image of Scandinavia, because migrations of people from over there always enliven the culture of here. Movements of people create new words, new ideas, and inspire new art. I am the product of an immigrant culture in the Midwest, and I now live in New York City, where forty percent of my fellow inhabitants were born in another country. On one of my last trips to Oslo, I climbed into a taxi, gave an address, and began a conversation with the driver. His father had been born in Pakistan, but he was born in Norway. He needn’t have told me; his Oslo dialect was unmistakable.

While immigrants always revivify the country they enter, their presence also creates conflict. In the United States, where all of us, with the exception of Native Americans, came from somewhere else, superiority was measured in generations. The longer your family had lived in America, the better. In 1972–73, when I lived in Bergen, there were no immigrants in town, and yet with a regularity that never failed to surprise me, and despite the fact that I was a passionate supporter of civil rights, I was attacked for my country’s racism. After the wave of Pakistani immigration to Norway, I returned to find people casually using racial slurs and prey to denigrating stereotypes. In short, they said things that would have been anathema in the United States. Like their cohorts all over the world, right-wing politicians in Scandinavia are guilty of thinking in terms of us and them, of exploiting ignorance and fear to maintain a fiction of “the nation,” not as a shared geography or language, but nation as blood or background. This is always dangerous, and it inevitably stinks of the ugliest of ideas: racial purity. In the United States, one of the oddest legacies of our racist culture is that people who have very pale skin but some African ancestry, like Lena Horne or Colin Powell, are inevitably called “black” rather than “white.” The Nazi racial laws created the most ludicrous hairsplitting over percentages of Jewishness in the population, a frankly absurd notion in a country where Jews had lived for hundreds of years and had been marrying Gentiles for just as long. In the tiny world of immigrants and their children and grandchildren in which my father spent his boyhood, the Swedes and Danes in neighboring communities were not regarded as linguistic cousins with important historical and cultural links to Norwegians. They were foreigners. And yet, there is no story without change. That world my father knew as a child is gone forever. In college, I knew a person with a background he described as “part Swedish, part German, and part Sioux Indian.” My daughter refers to herself as “half Norwegian” and “half Jewish.” She likes to call herself a “Jewegian.” Scandinavia is a word whose meanings are in flux. Its myriad references and significations are being determined, and we can only hope that it will stand as a sign of inclusion, not exclusion.

2005